One area in which Intel is significantly more open than any manufacturer in the ARM ecosystem is in graphics hardware. Although Intel hasn't opened all their GPUs fully yet (from what I've read), this seems to be mostly because providing all the documentation takes time, not because they are against making everything open.

This contrasts dramatically with every single ARM license in existence. ARM's own MALI GPU is tightly closed (probably because MALI was a licensed technology) so the Lima team is having to reverse engineer a Linux driver. All the ARM licensees who provide GPUs seem to be either unable to open their GPU information because their GPU core has been licensed from a 3rd party, or else are simply disinterested in doing so, or else vehemently opposed to it for alleged commercial reasons in at least a couple of cases. So, the prospect of open documentation on SoC GPUs appearing from ARM manufacturers is vanishingly small.

This gives Intel at least one possible opening through which they can be fairly certain that the competition will not follow. Although that may be worth a lot to us in this community, the commercial payback from community support tends to be very slow in coming. Still, it's something that Intel might consider an advantage worth seizing in the mobile race where they're a rank outsider.

Samsung is a supplier of really top quality electronic components in the industry, and at the same time offers those components at extremely competitive prices. That made Apple the primary beneficiary of their contractual relationship, because you can be dead certain that Apple didn't let Samsung charge a premium just because their components were going into high margin Apple products. Samsung doesn't have to beg people to buy their components, they sell themselves on price. Samsung PoP memory even went into the extremely cost-sensitive Raspberry Pi, which really underlines Samsung's approach to pricing.

Once Apple replaces Samsung after their myopic patent war, the replacement partner is very unlikely to match Samsung on quality and price together, so if Apple wants high quality they're going to have to pay more and pass that cost on to their customers.

There is only one loser in all of this, Apple users, because it's unlikely that Apple will reduce their margins. And Samsung is almost certainly delighted that once Apple finds a replacement they can stop supplying a partner that chose to become an enemy, and in the interim to force a price hike.

Samsung is a semiconductor manufacturer (among many other things), and with that comes a whole slew of innovation in electronics. You should check out their leading edge work in camera sensors, not just for smartphones but also at the high end for very impressive cameras of all types that rival Nikon and Canon in some areas. They are very much a leading technology company.

And of course their ARM designs are among the best in the field as well, often detailed here. It's a reasonable guess that Intel is going to be under pressure from Samsung in the power-per-watt area in the not too distant future.

Comparing Samsung to Apple is kind of silly. The company is much more comparable to Sony (in their heyday), omnipresent in all fields of manufacturing. Like all huge engineering conglomerates, they innovate incrementally and continuously, and mostly silently without needing a media circus.

I think perhaps the point that he was making about designing with pointers wasn't fully appreciated by everyone, because he didn't really spell it out. It's not just a matter of preferred coding style nor clarity, far from it.

The unconditional pointer update approach is atomic by virtue of the update being performed in a single memory write cycle, whereas the longer conditional form is clearly not atomic, and to make it atomic would require using locks. (There's a bit more to it than that because you still have to worry about what is being assigned, but it does reduce the scope of the problem significantly.)

This distinction is extremely important in a highly concurrent application like an operating system kernel, because you can merrily use his preferred code everywhere without worrying whether it's going to be used concurrently or only called within a protected critical region. In contrast, if the conditional form were used concurrently then you would have a wonderful recipe for intermittent concurrency bugs, the kernel designer's very worst nightmare.

Is Curiosity rover male or female?

On report panels and interviews, the scientists and engineers on the Curiosity team refer to the rover as "she" and "her" .

Using the female gender seems to be traditional for ships, so perhaps that extends to spaceships, and by association, to space probes.

It takes time to hone courses and online teaching methodologies into effective systems of education, so it's no huge surprise if the quality is below standard at the moment.

That first AI course of Thrun and Norvig's was nothing short of a didactic disaster, full of unexplained inconsistencies in the material, very limited coverage of the area, and no effective authoritative means of answering queries and misunderstandings. The many online fora were just the blind leading the blind. In summary, it was not a Stanford quality course. Many people still benefited from it, but that's a testament to their own individual perseverance and not to the quality of the material nor the teaching.

It will take time to get it right, and I'm sure that that particular course has improved already. But even more importantly, it will require a lot of experience to flow under the bridge before MOOCs earn significant respect, much of that experience based on trial and error. This should be no surprise. Physically attended courses didn't become perfect overnight either.

Encryption of all your Internet comms has been recommended forever and a day, but the bulk of the population hasn't bothered so far because the "postman opening letters" hasn't been very overt and in the public eye.

Now that the politicians are all in the game of demanding their "right" to monitor everything, perhaps it's time that people will respond by finally encrypting everything and telling the police state advocates to sod off and stop terrorizing the population.

I wonder how Apple is going to spin the fact that every man and their dog was releasing a 7" tablet at the time that Jobs was vitriolic in his total contempt for that size. How times change.

Welcome to the party, Apple. You'll discover that it's an excellent form factor for tablets, very mobile for use on the go instead of merely transportable like larger ones, and it doesn't force you to squint like a smartphone display. Best all-rounder size, I reckon.

I love mine, it's proven repeatedly to have been the right choice and an excellent workhorse.

This man deserves a medal for ingenuity under extreme hardship.

One thing that added unnecessarily to his misery though was that the hospital recommended a prosthetic that he couldn't afford. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination for hospitals to run cheap RepRap-type 3D printers for such needs and print out basic parts on demand. Both the building and running costs are very low indeed.

Of course such parts would be very poor compared to professional prosthetics or even professional 3D printing, but when the choice is between that and nothing, it's hard to argue against it. And the flexibility of such printing means that it is easily adapted to evolve with individual requirements, and replacement of printed parts is almost cost-free when they break or wear out.

It seems a good fit for this kind of unfortunate situation, and it might have made this man's days more bearable as he worked on his own solution, or indeed contributed to it where plastic is more appropriate than steel.

I recognize that this is a way out there question to the point of making me laugh, but nevertheless, it's a real physics question in the same general domain as GRACE's measurements. A general idea of the magnitudes involved would certainly be interesting.

By how many orders of magnitude do orbital measurements of local gravity fall short of being able to detect human or human-generated movement on the planet's surface, for example the travel of a train across the country? Related, would the main difficulty likely be to achieve sufficient sensitivity, or to extract the desired signal from the noise floor of atmospheric gravity and other sources? And finally, what is the gravitational contribution of the atmosphere to your measurements?

Here is a legal analysis of the situation:

The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing

It's somewhat long, but a one-line summary of what they concluded could be roughly:

At least in the UK and EU, there is no strong legal basis for constraints on non-commercial personal 3D printing.

It's worth reading the whole thing though, as it covers many different forms of legal restrictions on object replication. It certainly foresees problems ahead for commercial companies in this area, but provides legal opinion why personal printing is largely immune to it all.

Of course this means very little in the US legal system where anyone can sue anyone else for anything or for nothing.

Humans have an innate ability to comprehend the spatial organization of an object and to replicate it in another medium, even to scale it automatically. Most of us are not expert sculptors and so we would do a rather poor job of it, but nevertheless, the ability is inherent in us all.

The so-called "reverse rendering" in the article is, again, just part of our innate object recognition ability. Without that ability, images would unrecognizable to us as 2D projections of 3D objects. The ability appears to be quite widespread throughout the animal kingdom too, it's certainly not limited just to us.

Improving this process by computerizing the object capture from 2D images and replicating the object through 3D printing is obviously very useful on a practical level, but hopefully the process is not being claimed to be something new. The process is quite obvious to us because we do it in our heads and with our hands as a natural ability, and it has thousands of years of prior art.

Doing it on a computer with a lot of maths doesn't change that. And maths isn't itself patentable, or at it least shouldn't be.

He's right in many more ways than one. Hedging his bets against a future in which Microsoft is his biggest rival is only one reason for doing this. The other big reason is simply to expand the gaming market, and to lead it.

It's no secret that the Linux world is full of endearing geeks and nerds who love to play video games --- there could hardly be a bigger truism! And yet they are totally under-served on their favorite platform, and frequently have to run a Windows box for the sole reason of being able to play their games. That presents an obvious business opportunity.

By supplying Linux gamers with good games on their favorite platform, not only is he expanding his customer base to a whole new audience of Linux-only gamers, but is also making it possible for Linux gamers to avoid running a Windows box at all. And that can remove one of his rivals from the competition entirely. It would be a move of genius.

What's more, if Linux gaming takes off bigtime (his company certainly has every opportunity to make that happen), then he will be the leader in a new gaming frontier, and everyone else will be playing catchup. That is worth a gamble all by itself, and it's not even a high-risk venture.

I think Gabe's business nose can sense a big opportunity here, a huge and almost unexploited market that he can make his own, while at the same time safeguarding his future against Microsoft.

Mouttet, a former U.S. patent officer who specialized in nanotechnology, has long argued that HP's technology is not really a memristor. "All HP is doing, in my opinion, is skewing the history to make it look like they were the originators of this technology and it is really not true", Mouttet tells Wired. "To me, this is unethical."

Former U.S. patent officer calls someone unethical. The mind boggles.

And as if that weren't enough, he has patents in the area himself and therefore cannot be a fair witness.

Skepticism about radical new devices is always healthy, but Mouttet's opinion on this topic inspires the opposite of confidence.

A probe in orbit around every planet or dwarf planet in the solar system would seems like a fairly basic NASA objective to me.

I know that New Horizons will be using its velocity to also attempt flybys of one or more other Kuiper belt objects after it shoots through the Pluto system, and that is very worthwhile indeed, but we also seriously need a probe in orbit around Pluto itself.

I hope that they're working on such a mission already, so that when New Horizons returns Pluto data in 2015 they just need to tweak a few parameters and be ready to launch an orbital mission. Such new data could even be sent to an orbital mission that's already en route to Pluto.